You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Friday, Feb 11, 2005, 9:41 AM in Fun
Project Manager Leavers Suicide PPT Presentation
Here.
Scott Hanselman IM'd me this Onion piece and I just had to share it. I don't want to spoil it with quotes; just read it and tell me if you don't die laughing.
OK, one quote:
"To Ron's credit, it was one helluva way to go out," human resources manager Gail Everts said. "Ron clearly spent a lot of time on that presentation. If the subject matter weren't so heavy, we'd probably use it to train his replacement."
Thursday, Feb 10, 2005, 3:33 PM in .NET
Smart Client Patterns & Practices Survey
"The Smart Client Team at Microsoft patterns & practices needs your feedback to evaluate the need of guidance for devices based Smart Clients (Mobile solution scenarios based on .NET Compact Framework)."
Thursday, Feb 10, 2005, 8:12 AM
Google Site Search *Is* Working!
Doh! It was all about the outer <form runat="server"> that I wasn't using on my web pages, but just left 'cuz "it wasn't hurting anything." Removing the outer form let the inner Google site search form work and wa la -- site searching on sellsbrothers.com (and it only took 10 years : ). Thanks to Nic Wise for his diagnosis!
Thursday, Feb 10, 2005, 5:29 AM in .NET
Indigo Day: Mujtaba Syed's Notes From The Field
Mujtaba Syed has some pretty extensive notes from his VSLive Day of Indigo:
- Introducing Indigo: Eric Rudder and Ari Bixhorn
- Programming Indigo: Don Box and Steve Swartz
- WinFX CTP in March '05
- Indigo upgrade and interop: Steve Swartz and Anand Rajagopalan
- Building Secure Services with Indigo: Doug Purdy
- Building service-oriented applications today: Richard Turner
Thanks, Mujtaba!
Wednesday, Feb 9, 2005, 5:15 PM in .NET
VSLive Indigo Day Coverage from TheServerSide
Paul Ballard provides a nice summary of the Indigo Day at VSLive. I especially like the acronyms that the Indigo boys were using; the ABCs of Indigo and the CIA of security are damned easy to remember!
Wednesday, Feb 9, 2005, 10:03 AM in .NET
Introducing Indigo: An Early Look
"David Chappell provides an architectural overview of 'Indigo,' Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. The paper covers Indigo's relationship to existing distributed application technologies in the .NET Framework, the basics of creating and consuming Indigo services, and an overview of Indigo's capabilities, including security, reliable messaging, and transaction support."
The first article of a new Indigo programming model since PDC03 (and hopefully the one that'll stick : ).
Wednesday, Feb 9, 2005, 9:12 AM in The Spout
I Think VSLive Is *It*
It's become apparent to me that for Microsoft-focused non-Microsoft hosted conferences, VSLive is it. I know that in the past that they've had financial problems, but I haven't heard rumors of that for a while. Even more importantly, their attendance numbers and their coverage is top notch for 3rd party Windows developer conferences. If I was going to speak at a wide-reach Windows developer conference that wasn't a TechEd or a PDC, VSLive would be it.
Wednesday, Feb 9, 2005, 8:39 AM in .NET
Video: Soma on Visual Studio 2005 + Smart Clients
"Somasegar says a key component of continuing this momentum is creating 'connected systems' that work together by using smart clients. 'Let's take the best from the Web client world and the best from the rich client world, and—voila!—you have a smart client,' Somasegar says. Smart clients can allow several applications to share code with one another while using minimal resources, eliminating the need to duplicate coding efforts; essentially, if one application requires a piece of code existing already in another application, it simply can request the code to be sent over. 'The cheapest piece of code is the piece of code that you don't have to write in the first place,' Somasegar says, as smart clients provide interoperability through Web services and leverage existing investments. 'Enabling developers to reuse existing assets is a key design goal.' The end result of using a smart client, ultimately, is a rich user experience that requires using minimal resources."
Wednesday, Feb 9, 2005, 7:29 AM in .NET
Clemens says "Hello, World" via Indigo
"If you looked at the PDC 2003 Indigo bits, you will notice that the [Indigo] programming model changed quite a bit. I think that in fact, every single element of the programming model changed since then. And all for the better. The programming model is so intuitive by now that I am (almost) tempted to say 'Alright, understood, next technology, please.'"
Wednesday, Feb 9, 2005, 7:01 AM in .NET
Watch Eric Rudder's VSLive Indigo Keynote
"Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, showed off Indigo at this morning's VSLive! keynote. Indigo, Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications, is a key component of Microsoft's next Windows release (code-named Longhorn). Rudder asserted that Indigo will provide improved interoperability and productivity, as well as a more flexible security model for developers creating service-oriented applications. He also noted that Indigo will make it easier to build secure, reliable, transacted Web services."
By far my favorite part of this presentation (except for watching Ari's heart beat at 155bpm) was watching Eric show the small transitions needed to move existing code to Indigo from ASMX, Enterprise Services, WSE2, MSMQ and Remoting and how well Indigo will integrate with BizTalk and SQL Server in the future. I'm sure it won't all be changing attributes and removing extraneous code, but if the majority of the porting work fits that model, I'll be impressed indeed. Of course, as Eric says, there's no requirement to move your code to Indigo if you don't want to; the goal of the Indigo team is to make it smooth if you want to. And finally, Eric says that we'll be releasing a new WinFX CTP in March, which will include both Avalon and Indigo (although it may be March 38th or March 43rd : ).Tuesday, Feb 8, 2005, 3:59 PM in .NET
Allowing Partially Trusted Callers
If you're not familiar with the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (pronounced "apt-ka" by those in the know...) or worse, if you just apply it 'til stuff works, you need to read this blog post from Shawn Farkas, SDE/T on the .NET CLR team.
Tuesday, Feb 8, 2005, 12:03 PM in Fun
Trying To Be As Cool As Star Trek
Here. 
Tuesday, Feb 8, 2005, 11:31 AM in Fun
Trying To Be As Cool As Star Trek
On the left, you see Lt. Uhura with her wireless Bluetooth headset (although I'm not sure of the made and model). On the right, you see me with mine (the Nextlink Bluespoon AX). I've waited all my life to be as cool as the folks on Star Trek and now it's finally happened! I'm ready for my replicator, transporter, tricorder and Holodeck now...
Tuesday, Feb 8, 2005, 11:04 AM in Tools
XSLTO: Mapping XSLT to Objects
Here. When Tim Ewald was still a Microsoft employee, he and the next-gen MSDN content management system team experimented with some fun techniques for XSLT to Object mapping. To illustrate this technique, Kim Wolk has built a little prototype that lets you associate an XPATH statement with a method on an object and that method will be invoked for the nodes that match the XPATH statement. Check it out.
Update: Steve Dunn has ported Kim's sample from .NET 2.0 beta to .NET 1.1. Thanks, Steve!Tuesday, Feb 8, 2005, 10:29 AM in .NET
Avalon + Scaleable Golf == Hole in N
Mike Marshall over at the 19th hole has been digging into Avalon to experiment with scalable graphics, golf, ClickOnce and 3rd party drawing tools. Check out these installments:
- My foray into the Avalon CTP
- The first hurdle: Creating Complex XAML Paths the Quick and Painless Way
- Step 2: Adding custom XAML attributes
- more to come...
I love that folks have started to document their learning processes on their blogs. There's no better way for the WinFX folks to get a look at how folks are approaching their technology. Keep it up!